PREHISTORY AND THE BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION: HISTORY OF MANKIND- Volume I

Written under the auspices of UNESCO and planned by an international body of experts, History of Mankind is, or at least as far as this its first volume goes, a hold, brilliantly balanced, forthrightly mind-bracing work. Its scholarship, style and extraordinary coverage, both that already proven and that projected, seem destined to make it an intellectual blockbuster capable of capturing the popular imagination during the sixties in much the same way H. G. Wells' Outline of History did in the thirties. The disciplines used are those of anthropology, archaeology and cultural history. Jacquetta Hawkes tackles the first part, that of our prehistoric past, the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, the early apemen of the African genesis, the homo-sapiens emergence, the spread of hunting and husbandry, the magico-religious ordering of communal societies etc., while Sir Leonard Woolley continues with the second part devoted to the Bronze Age, the rise of civilization in Mesopatamia and the Nile valley, the consequent urbanization of society, its economy, laws and arts, Egypt's ""static spirit"" and the Sumerian priesthood. Many maps, in-text line cuts and over 50 pages of half-tones are all part of this mammoth voyage; a stirring, stimulating experience, but also cool-headed, comprehensive and exact.